Most AB Support snags come down to something not being connected yet. Here’s how to spot which, and the fix for each.
Start in Settings. Almost every issue below is a channel that hasn’t been turned on or consented there. Each channel section shows Active or Not connected — that badge alone answers most questions.
I sent a test email and no ticket appeared
Wait five minutes before troubleshooting anything. Inbound mail is polled roughly every 5 minutes, so email is never instant. This is the most common false alarm. Web chat is live — use it if you want an immediate test.
No inquiry cards in the Teams channel
New inquiries should post an adaptive card to your channel. If they don’t:
- Make sure AB Support is installed in that channel (not just as a personal app), and the tab has been configured — see Installing AB Support.
- If it was working and stopped after a change, remove and re-add the app to the channel so the bot re-registers.
Email isn’t becoming tickets
- Confirm the support mailbox is connected and consented by an admin in support email — without that one-time consent, AB Support can’t read or send mail.
- Check Enable inbound email → tickets is ticked and saved — entering the mailbox alone isn’t enough.
- Check you’re pointing at a shared mailbox your team owns, spelled exactly right.
WhatsApp or SMS messages aren’t arriving
- Check Enable inbound WhatsApp & SMS → tickets is ticked and saved, and the number is the one assigned to this desk.
- WhatsApp needs a one-time Meta business verification before it works at all. Unlike SMS it isn’t self-serve — if you haven’t been through that with us, WhatsApp will simply never deliver. Contact us to start it.
- Formatting isn’t the problem — spaces and
+are ignored, so the number matches however you typed it.
A reply to a customer didn’t get through
- Check the ticket’s activity timeline. Undelivered replies are logged there rather than failing silently — see how a ticket works.
- On WhatsApp, a reply sent outside the 24-hour window Meta allows won’t be delivered. Follow up on another channel.
- A customer who has opted out of messaging won’t receive anything on that channel.
Replies have stopped going out altogether
If every reply is failing rather than one, check your monthly allowance first. A desk that has used up its customer transactions for the month can’t reply on any channel — and it looks exactly like a broken connection, which sends people hunting through Settings for a fault that isn’t there. See your monthly allowance.
- Open a ticket from a Teams inquiry card and read the two meters at the top — that is the only place they appear, so you won’t find them on the dashboard or the ticket list.
- Customer transactions at zero stops replying for everyone, on every channel. AI credits at zero stops only the AI — your agents can still reply normally.
- Nothing has been lost. Customer messages keep arriving and keep becoming tickets the whole time.
- Adding a Usage Pack restores capacity immediately; otherwise it resets at the start of the month.
- The allowance is counted for your whole organization, so a busy second desk can use up what a quiet one was relying on.
The AI answers wrong or says “I don’t know”
- The AI only knows what’s in your knowledge sources. If it’s wrong or blank, add or fix the source article that should answer the question — remember the customer gets that answer directly, unreviewed.
- A brand-new desk with no sources configured will escalate nearly everything. That’s expected, not a fault.
- If the AI stopped answering everything quite suddenly, that’s not a content problem — check whether the month’s AI credits have run out.
- Watch the helpfulness score — thumbs-down votes point straight at the gaps.
The web-chat bubble doesn’t appear on my site
- Check the embed snippet is on the page and its
data-keymatches the widget key in your web chat settings — a stale or mismatched key is the usual cause. - If you regenerated the key, update the snippet everywhere it’s embedded — and anywhere your web form posts it, since they share one key.
- Use Preview widget in Settings to confirm the widget itself is healthy before hunting through your site’s code.
I signed in on the web but see no desks
- Access follows Teams channel membership. If you’re not in a channel that has AB Support set up, you’ll see nothing — signing in on the web doesn’t grant access by itself. See who can see your tickets.
- Make sure you signed in with the same Microsoft account you use in Teams.
- Desks can’t be created on the web — if none exists yet, someone has to add the tab in Teams first.
Still stuck? Re-check the matching channel article (channels overview) — it lists exactly what has to be set for each channel to work, and how long each one takes to go live.
Nine times out of ten it’s a connection that hasn’t been made yet — walk Settings top to bottom and the gap usually stands out.